Friday, 6 December 2013

Cutbacks? What Cutbacks? Part 2587925

Hackney council is providing funds to help develop Mabley Green into a place planted with fruit, vegetable, nut and herb trees and bushes for people to pick and eat the produce.

Mmmm! I love my fresh produce flavoured with diesel fumes and the tang of ganja, lightly coated in dog and fox urine.

Doesn't everyone?

The council is giving £100,000 to pay for planting at the site near the Olympic Park, along with outreach programmes for school and pensioners’ groups and the salary for three years of a part-time officer to care for it.

Now, I can’t quite figure out if that means £100000 for all of the above, or just for the planting and the rest is extra…

However, many locals, including the Mabley Green User Group, are fighting …

To prevent such a barmy money-wasting scheme?

… to have a much bigger area for the edible park…

Wha..?

… so that it would beat the current record holder, the seven-acre Beacon Food Forest in Seattle which opened in 2009.

/facepalm

Mr Rafferty (Ed: chair of the user group) said that the edible garden would help tackle childhood obesity rates, of which Hackney has some of the worst in London.

Is that all? Won’t it usher in world peace as well?

He said: “If children can come into the park and forage for and interact with fruits and vegetables it will make being healthy fun for them.

“We also want Hackney mums to be able to say to the children, ‘Run to the park and pick some apples for the tea.’

14 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It's not wholly bad. If vandalism doesn't destroy it, then "the Tragedy of the commons" will; as sure as gravity pulls apples to earth. Either way we are training a generation of people that Socialism doesn't work.

If only we could train socialists to change their mind when confronted by reality.

I don't want to damn the idea because I have seen local orchards work quite well. But there is something daftly sweet about a spokesperson who talks about sending children to the park to collect apples for tea as if they grew all the year round.

Who is to pay for the policing of it? There could be a Wolf/Paedo/Smoker hiding behind every appple tree just waiting to prey on small apple-gathering tots callously sent out by their benefit-scrounging parents to find food for tea.

And god help them if they plant FOREIGN apple trees ("Hardworking Busy British Moms FORCED to eat French Fruit!) or worse still BLACKberries!

I do like these public health schemes. They always have such a dramatic effect on our healthful wellbeingness. It reminds me of the muchness of money spent on my local park, where to great fanfare exercise machines were installed, to increase the wellfull healthbeingness of the populace.

And there they standt, forlorn and unused, gently rusting, to this day.

What about fencing an area off and calling it say an allotment, give them a water pipe into it and hey presto the local allotment society can run it themselves. How's that for a radical idea, challenging a bit of obesity, I know do some work you cretins.